Science and Technology : Anybody else Have Printing Problems with windows Vista?

[river]

I used to have a Lexmark All In One printer. It worked fine with windows xp but when I got Vista it started printin white text on a black background. I thought I needed a new driver and called Lexmark. The Indian cat I talked to showed me where I could download the driver for Vista. When I installed it the thing stopped working all together.

Now I have a Hewlett Packard All in One and it is doing the same thing. I discovered that it only prints the black background when I try to print from Wordpad. When I print from Microsoft Works it prints the last line at the top of the page and nothing else just that one line. when I try to print from Firefox it prints the whole page but only the bottom half of each letter. I don't know what it does with Microsoft Word since I don't have it.

I am thinking it must be my computer if two different printers do the same thing. But that's just a guess.

Anybody else have this problem with Vista or is it just MY Vista?

 

[anAfrican]

ouch. i see the practice continues: gotta buy new hardware when windoze changes.

have you searched the net for others having similar problems? does microsoft have anything to say about all-in-ones and vista?

i, too, would guess it's your puter. but not by itself; i would imagine vista might have something to do with things.

(i'm actually getting rather tired of linux; it ain't a whole lot different that windows in too many growing respects. i begin to run into problems quite similar to this one almost every time the linux kernel gets an upgrade ...)

guess i'll kill some time checking out this vista/all-in-one printer issue.

I used to have a Lexmark All In One printer. It worked fine with windows xp but when I got Vista it started printin white text on a black background. I thought I needed a new driver and called Lexmark. The Indian cat I talked to showed me where I could download the driver for Vista. When I installed it the thing stopped working all together.

Now I have a Hewlett Packard All in One and it is doing the same thing. I discovered that it only prints the black background when I try to print from Wordpad. When I print from Microsoft Works it prints the last line at the top of the page and nothing else just that one line. when I try to print from Firefox it prints the whole page but only the bottom half of each letter. I don't know what it does with Microsoft Word since I don't have it.

I am thinking it must be my computer if two different printers do the same thing. But that's just a guess.

Anybody else have this problem with Vista or is it just MY Vista?

 

[anAfrican]

been reading a bit and realized a couple questions:
which flavor of vista? 32bit or 64bit?
which printer?

there does seem to be a trend of limited functionality between vista and all-in-one printers. lexmark, apparently, updated their driver(s) last week.

somebody did post a listing of "compatible vista printers". (sorry; i keep running into that too "well, yeah, sure; fine. how about my printer?!")

somebody also mentioned something about "net administrator" having more rights to install stuff than the "administrator" privileges granted to a user with administrative rights?

another mentioned trying the xp drivers ...

 

[river]

been reading a bit and realized a couple questions:
which flavor of vista? 32bit or 64bit?
which printer?

there does seem to be a trend of limited functionality between vista and all-in-one printers. lexmark, apparently, updated their driver(s) last week.

somebody did post a listing of "compatible vista printers". (sorry; i keep running into that too "well, yeah, sure; fine. how about my printer?!")

somebody also mentioned something about "net administrator" having more rights to install stuff than the "administrator" privileges granted to a user with administrative rights?

another mentioned trying the xp drivers ...

Hey brotha anAfrican,

Did anybody mention throwining this thing out the window (no pun indended)?

I looked at the troubleshooting advice for printer problems. Really assinine stuff like what to do if your printer runs out of paper--duh. and I did a google for the specific problem. I didn't call Microsoft because they charge. I called HP and spent two hours on the phone being told to take this out and unplug that and plug it back and press this and hold on while I talk to my supervisor etc. I finally hung up while they had me on hold. They called back and told my voice mail they would be calling again in two days. This supposed to be toll free call better not show up on my Sprint. How do I find out what flavor Vista I have?

I suspected it might have something to do with the All in One thing. I've a mind to just get a plain old printer that does nothing but print

 

[anAfrican]

hey Sis,

i would think that "throwing the windows out of this thing" might serve better ...

yeah, windows has always had a sort of "chinese fire drill" philosophy toward fixing problems. (car full of people stop in the middle of the street and everybody jumps out and runs around to another seat and then they resume traveling.)

i saw that as well: remover the printer, remove the print spooler, remove the drivers, unplug the printer, reboot the puter, insert installation disk and wait until the installation process tells you to plug the printer in. (is it a usb printer?) also, i saw mention of going into the registry and deleting every entry relating to printing, including being sure that all entries for any other printers are gone and getting rid of the print spooler.

and, no, i really didn't see much regarding the weird printing patterns you describe. but given what you have described, it sounds like a handshaking problem between the puter's printer drivers and where other applications expect functions within the printer driver to be. but, like they said "they are working on it and will get back in a few days" - for some reason, it really looks like whatever microsoft did to their software threw all the hardware manufacturers for the same sad loop that the consumers got tossed through. "massa say I tell you what hardware and software you can use with the computer you bought (and that I own)!"

i would imagine that the boot screen would state which it is. also, windows used to say that on the general tab of the device manager. given that they changed how to get to the device manager between 9x and xp, i'd imagine it might be even more hidden in vista.

just imagine how much trouble you'd be having if you hadn't taken that microsoft training!!?

good luck!!

Hey brotha anAfrican,

Did anybody mention throwining this thing out the window (no pun indended)?

I looked at the troubleshooting advice for printer problems. Really assinine stuff like what to do if your printer runs out of paper--duh. and I did a google for the specific problem. I didn't call Microsoft because they charge. I called HP and spent two hours on the phone being told to take this out and unplug that and plug it back and press this and hold on while I talk to my supervisor etc. I finally hung up while they had me on hold. They called back and told my voice mail they would be calling again in two days. This supposed to be toll free call better not show up on my Sprint. How do I find out what flavor Vista I have?

I suspected it might have something to do with the All in One thing. I've a mind to just get a plain old printer that does nothing but print